James Mollison

As The Photographers’ Gallery prepares to move intoprestigious new premises, its curator senses a new-foundnational confidence in the medium, says Annie Dare

Mollison enrolled on the animation course at Newport School of Art and Design just as it was being reclassified as a University – a nationwide shift in the UK education system that, happily, meant he had to pick a second subject to upgrade his one-year Higher National Diploma into a three-year degree. The head of photography there, pioneering 1970s documentary photographer Daniel Meadows, was just leaving the department. Mollison selfdeprecatingly says that “because Meadows didn’t care who got on the course, I made it on.” Although he did well in his first-choice, animation, Mollison was left cold by the laborious, isolating graft that went with it. In documentary photography, on the other hand, he revelled in the process. “I was going out, meeting people, and I liked the immediacy of the discipline, and the way it introduced me to the world,” he says.

But on graduation, the editorial photography market was less than robust, as the UK Saturday and Sunday newspaper supplements were already starting to switch focus from reportage to
lifestyle, and the experience of knocking on picture editors’ doors was bruising. Chance intervened, however, and a visit to see a friend working at Benetton creative laboratory Fabrica led to an interview with its founder Oliviero Toscani, and the offer of a place at the Italian school. Toscani’s tutelage was frenetic, and gave Mollison a crash course in many creative disciplines.

His real formative experience was not with Toscani, however, but with Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, the two South African photographers who stepped in to edit Benetton’s COLORS
magazine at the end of 2000. They revolutionised its content, fixing their journalistic gaze relentlessly for long periods on single communities. They devoted whole issues to one place, faithful to a doggedly detailed 1950s documentary style that was the exact antithesis of the hit-and-run borderhopping practice that was the hallmark of most early 21st century photography. Mollison cites the month he spent with Broomberg, Chanarin and fashion
photographer Stefan Ruiz – living in a refugee camp in Tanzania – as a defining experience in his life and career.

The methodology of drilling into a subject are the characteristics that tie together a diverse portfolio that has gone from studies of chimps to an archive of artefacts of the Colombian cocaine cartel leader Pablo Escobar. “Fundamentally, I’m interested in how to transmit ideas through photographic language,” he says. It was the documentaries of David Attenborough that triggered Mollison’s anthropomorphic 2004 study of bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, James and Other Apes, pictured here. “I was struck by how similar their face structure is to humans, and I thought it would be interesting to take passport photos of them, and to back this with textual life stories.”

A true passport photo set up was impossible to replicate – wild primates react predictably badly to backdrops – so Mollison cropped in close to get passportlike consistency. He went to places with fewer restrictions on access to wildlife than the UK, places like Cameroon and Congo, which in turn introduced him to the disturbing bush-meat trade.

Grafik praises the portraits for capturing a likeness to humans, but also unsettling us because of our expectations of how animals might respond to the camera. Mollison’s new book of portraits of music fans at concerts, which also questions our obsession with celebrity, is published by
Chris Boot this Autumn.